14 ORCHID HYBRIDS. 



The advance-guard of the army of orchid hybrids 

 which has been arriving with us in the early sixties, has 

 been followed by a steady increase of their number until 

 now we almost despair of ever getting order into the 

 leadership-lost legions. The Cypripedia-crosses, which 

 have been recorded by me, pass the thousand mark. If 

 I should be told that I come too late with my effort to 

 restore order in this vastness of accumulated material, 

 I feel satisfied such voice must come from a man who 

 has been baffled in the attempt to sift the multitude of 

 varieties for himself. I agree with him that it is a great 

 pity that a weeding out of this bed of plant-names has 

 not taken place before this, but what is this wilderness 

 grown up in the past thirty years to what it will be only 

 three years hence? We can not take up a journal with- 

 out finding reference made to the hundreds, nay, thou- 

 sands of seedlings growing up in every collection where 

 orchids find a home. Like the cat in Scheffel's Trum- 

 peter from Saekkingen, remarks: 



Seinen Hausbedarf an Liedern 

 Reimt ein jeder selbst sich heute 



so does everybody who devotes a few square yards of 

 glass to orchid culture try to raise his homeconsume of 

 hybrids. It is, therefore, good time yet to come forward 

 with my list, before the period sets in in which we will 

 attribute more praise to the products of home cultiva- 

 tion than to the importing of ever new varieties. 



If you read in one number of our principal horticul- 

 tural journal that the old, old cross of Cypripedium 

 vernixium has been reraised with no material difference 

 than the use of another variety of the original species, 

 and that its progeny receives the two distinct names of 

 Murillo and Dibdin; and the next week's edition of this 

 very same journal tells us of two more places where this 



